Triage
Dare Obasanjo: Sam Ruby has asked whether the WCF RSS Toolkit supports ETags which is really a proxy for asking whether WCF supports manipulating HTTP headers directly. In my conversations with WCF folks like Yasser & Doug, the answer is that although the WCF RSS Toolkit doesn’t support ETags that this was due to time constraints than any limitations in WCF.
Close. As Gordon would say allowing HTTP headers to be manipulated directly is an idea that could work if people would just follow policy.
No, the question is more of a proxy for asking if the WCF RSS Toolkit supports caching. Its a scalability thing. And typically exposes whether the underlying framework is a dumb router/transformer or is an active participant in the state transfer.
In your experience with syndication, do feeds tend to be polled relentlessly, whether or not they have changed? Passing a request all the way to the application whether or not the data has changed may tend to limit the overall scalability of the application. In servers such as Apache, 304s responses tend to be highly optimized.
Additionally, knowing which features a given team views as important, and which features don’t make the cut due to “time constraints” provides a lot of insight into which features the team view as crucial, and which they view as tickie marks, and this in turn provides a lot of insights into the priorities of the product team, doncha think?
As does the mapping of both names and email addresses to the same field.
As does the use of the term RSS generically.
Mind you, none of these indicators are conclusive, but taken together…
Meanwhile, people will take a look at these samples, and emulate them. And build up an impression of WCF based on the aspects of WCF that these samples expose.
Eventually, they are bound to notice that “Our WCF [DataContract] doesn’t support attributes. That’s a deliberate choice”. Pssst. A little secret: RSS (any version) requires attributes.
I hope I’m wrong (I haven’t even downloaded the sample, so all this is based on heresay and conjecture), but all signs point to someone wanting to hitch a ride on the RSS Bandwagon, but ended up not producing anything that even MSDN would want to use.
Am I wrong?